


Play With Fire (And You Might Get Burned)

by define_serenity



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: F/M, Multi, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-18
Updated: 2009-04-18
Packaged: 2018-05-29 22:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6396160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/define_serenity/pseuds/define_serenity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Do you have a girlfriend?" Elle asks him one day. </p><p>He did have a girlfriend up until recently; her name was Eden and they had met at a local bookstore. Things hadn't worked out between them; there were things in her past she couldn't tell him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Play With Fire (And You Might Get Burned)

He meets Elle Bishop on a manic Monday. A car skids to a stop right outside his shop, engines roar and the brakes squeak to a halt, followed by a light bang and a scream. When he runs out to check there’s a young blonde sitting on the sidewalk, alternately cursing underneath her breath and shouting at the driver that must have hit her.

“Are you alright?” Gabriel approaches her carefully, obligated to ask the question when he sees the deep bloody gash under her knee.

“No, I’m not alright!” she sneers and rolls her eyes, her voice loud and cutting, and she raises her hand so she can shield her eyes from the sun. She gives him a single glance, before returning her attention to her leg. 

“It hurts like a motherf…” she swallows her words and wriggles her foot just to prevent herself from scratching the wound. 

“Do you have a cell phone I can borrow? I dropped mine when that idiot over there almost RAN ME OVER!” the blonde shouts at the man across the street, who promptly flips her off, but by then she's turned around to face him.

That’s how he meets Elle Bishop, all of her at once, every single flaw mixed with things that don’t add up. She seems angry and on her toes, a highly see-through defence mechanism, but on the inside she’s broken, afraid of what people think of her and only manages to hide somewhat of her vulnerabilities by using sarcasm. 

He’s nice to her, because despite her temper she's beautiful and her smile is honest, almost childlike, but he dismisses that quickly because just like him, she is looking for someone to genuinely connect with in this world. 

Sometimes she tells him he’s too nice for such a cruel world, and much too trusting. When he asks her why he shouldn’t trust her she gives him a story about how she used to like to play with fire, and how her daddy had send her to an institution where they tried to cure her.

“I accidentally set my grandmother’s house of fire when I was six,” her voice is steady, like it’s a tell-tale she’s told a million times before, but he can see the sadness looming behind her blue eyes. 

The more he hears, the sorrier he feels for her, even though he knows she hates him for his pity. But she’s the one who stays, latches on to him after he helped her to the hospital the day they first met, and she keeps coming back for more.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks him one day, probably because of the lack of photographs in his shop, or any personal items for that matter, besides his goldfish. 

He had a girlfriend up until recently; her name was Eden and they met at a local bookstore. 

Things hadn’t worked out between them, there were things in her past that she couldn’t tell him, and he got tired of the lies and the secrets.

 

.

 

_ It’s 2 in the morning, and he’s still up. A book lies open in his lap, but he stopped reading it hours ago. About around the time Eden told him she’d be home. But she still wasn’t.  _

_ When he calls her cell phone it goes straight to voicemail, and he's worried out of his mind. He can’t go out looking for her because he doesn’t have a clue where she went off to. _

_ She comes home at 4am. He hears her giggling through the door after she drops her keys so he opens the door for her.  _

_ “ _ _ Where the hell have you been?” he asks, and gives her a long hard stare.  _

_ “Jeez Gabe, overprotective much? I was just out with some friends from work.”  _

_ She's unsteady on her legs, swaying, but she manages to make it into the bedroom without tripping. _

_ "Fuck,” she curses when she opens her purse, and finds an empty cigarette box. She tosses it aside callously and keeps digging until she finds a single cigarette, and puts it between her lips. _

_ “Eden, that’s enough, you don’t smoke,” Gabriel plucks the cigarette from between her lips. “And you shouldn’t be drinking either.” _

_ "Yes, dad,” Eden salutes him, and gets underneath the sheets, still fully dressed. _

 

_. _

 

“Hey, did you hear what I said?” 

Elle’s hand is in the back of his neck, twirling his hair with her tiny fingers. It’s a sweet gesture, maybe a little early on, but he can imagine nothing in Elle’s life had ever happened to her at the right time. 

He tells her no, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he doesn’t tell her about Eden either. That’s his secret. 

“Good,” she smiles wide, and her eyes smile along.

Then, she sits down on his lap. 

“Do you maybe wanna go see a movie tonight?” 

She purses her lips as she drapes her arms around his neck, one side of her mouth quirking up in question; eyes wide open.

It’s their first date. 

They go see some action movie the papers had been raving about, according to Elle, of course, because he doesn’t normally keep up with that kind of stuff. He  humours  her, because he feels like it’s the least he can do, and he enjoys her company. 

She’s an open book, she puts herself out there, perhaps naively so, but she wears her heart on her sleeve and her eyes do the talking. 

So unlike Eden.

 

.

 

_ He comes home, and Eden is cooking. In itself it wasn’t so strange, but when he walked into the kitchen, he saw that Eden had out every single cooking book imaginable.  _

_ “What are you doing?” _

_ Eden startles at the sound of his voice, but turns around, smiling. “Don’t scare me like that." She punches him in the shoulder, and then kisses him softly on the lips. “And I’m cooking. Thought that was kind of obvious.” _

_ “For the entire building?” His eyes go wide in question. _

_ Eden pauses and glances around the kitchen, and it seems like she only now realizes what she's doing, “Oh, I guess I went a little all out,” she giggles, and wipes at her nose, leaving a white smear of flower behind, “But uhm, we can maybe freeze some stuff?” _

_ Gabriel nods absentmindedly, thinking that they could probably live off this stuff for two full weeks, but he doesn’t push it. He knows Eden’s mother taught her how to cook, and she was damn good at it. But for her to be going at it like this, something must be really wrong. _

 

_. _

 

The first time they kiss, it’s her initiative entirely. 

It’s not that he hasn’t wanted to, or that the opportunity hadn’t been there before, but he could tell something was holding her back. 

So he waits, for her to come to him. 

And when she does, she brings it all. 

They had walked home in the rain, and when they were at her flat, dry finally, she kissed him suddenly, her lips on his and static electricity playing between them, her tongue pushing past his lips. 

He tells her to slow down, and she does, until her body melts against his, and she’s kissing him deeply.

She doesn’t want him meeting her dad. He knows they’re close, or at least that’s what Elle likes to believe, but she doesn’t want to run the risk of her father’s disapproval of him. 

“He’s just a little overprotective,” she says.  Elle’s in his arms, on her sofa, watching some new television series about masked spies and people pretending to be someone else. 

That’s all she tells him, that she doesn’t want to run the risk of her father disliking him, but her eyes tell a different story. 

When he calls her on it, she looks away, and he fears that this will turn out to become a habit. 

Secrets, lies, and things left unsaid.

 

.

 

_ Two days later Eden storms into the shop, sorrow colouring her face and she looks like she could break out in tears any second.  _

_ “What’s wrong?” Gabriel gets up from behind his bench, but all Eden does is fall into his arms, and starts to cry the moment he has his arms around her. _

_ He holds her, and she cries, and he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.  _

_ “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks her later, when he brings her to his flat, and makes a cup of tea. _

_ “I’d rather not,” Eden answers, an identical answer in a long series of things she doesn’t feel like talking about.  _

_ He gets frustrated, and does a poor job of hiding it too. _

_ “God Gabe, sometimes you can be so… overprotective!” _

_ The same word falls again, and it lies between them in a distance Eden has created for them.  _

_ “Why can’t you just be here for me without asking questions like that?” _

 

_. _

 

“My father didn’t love me the way a normal daddy should have." 

Elle sits up, shying away from his touch, and there are tears in her eyes. 

Only a few seconds pass before he's holding her again, but so many things are revealed. The fire wasn’t the problem, it was never the problem. 

The fire was retaliation, the sarcasm was just a wall, between her and a father’s indecent touch.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and doesn’t dream of ever letting her go, “I’m so sorry.”

 

.

 

_ “I’m sorry."  _

_ He’s the one who ends up apologizing, again, an identical apology in a long series of fights left unsolved. _

 

.

 

Their first time together is special, or at least that’s what he tries to make of it. 

She comes in, dressed in a stunning blue dress that brings out her eyes, her blonde hair lusciously curled. 

He lit candles around the apartment, the only light around. 

She kisses him first, reaching for his lips on tiptoe and digging her fingers in his hair. 

“Elle, slow down,” he has to say again, “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” her answer comes, her eyes alight with the little flames around the room. 

Her little hand moves down into his trousers, as if she’s done so maybe times before, but it doesn’t fool him. 

“Make love to me,” she whispers, and he tells her to slow down, again.

 

.

 

_ His last time with Eden is hard.  _

_ She comes home drunk again, and part of him has already decided that he’s going to give her a choice. They can’t keep doing what they’re doing; it will only burn them up in the long run.  _

_ Maybe she knows that too; maybe that’s why she kisses him before he has a chance to say anything.  _

_ “ _ _ Make love to me,” she pleads against his lips, even though he knows it will be anything but. _

 

.

 

She wakes up screaming for her father, or screaming at her father, he can’t be sure. 

“Elle, it’s okay,” he shoots up in bed and puts his arms around her. She startles at the sudden touch, but he doesn’t let her go, “Shhh, it’s okay. It’s me. Everything is okay.”

“He was here, Gabriel,” she starts crying, and clutches on to him like a lifeline. “He knows. He knows I’ve been a bad girl. He’s going to hurt me.”

“Shhh,” he just holds her close to him, rocking their bodies back and forth in the bed, trying to make her feel at ease, “Nobody knows, Elle. You’re okay.”

 

.

 

_ “Eden?” he asks the dark when he sees she’s missing from the bed.  _

_ It’s 5am so he doubts she’s gone out, but then his eyes catch sight of the closet.  _

_ Eden’s clothes are gone.  _

_ “EDEN?” he shouts and gets up from the bed, but the only remnant he finds of her, is a little white paper, reading the word  _ goodbye _. _

_ Eden runs, maybe to prevent her heart from getting broken by hearing him speak the actual words. _

 

_. _

 

“Elle?” 

He wakes up again around 4 in the morning, only to find that Elle is no longer by his side. 

He panics, but calms down when he sees that her clothes are still on the floor. 

He gets up slowly from the bed, and finds Elle in the living room, sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, staring at the flame of a candle with big eyes. 

“Elle?” 

She looks up at him with the same big eyes. “You forgot to put out the candles.”

Gabriel knows that he could run, and maybe part of him wants to. But he doesn’t, because Elle needs him. And she’d probably keep up anyway.

 

 

** \- the end - **

 


End file.
